Contrastive Analysis of Words of Visual Perception in Chinese and English Languages

Supervisor: Prof. Shu Dingfang PhD Candidate: Zhu Yuan

2010. 5.18

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Motivations and Rationale

Man is the measure of all things ---- Protagoras of Abdera (c .480-410 B.C.) -----Confucious

Since the primitive society, people have regarded their own body as the measure of all things around, applied the cognitive experience of human body to the cognition of other things, and projected the body or a certain part of the body onto other things in order to understand the world.
However
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Embodied view of cognition

The mind is inherently embodied; Thought is mostly unconscious; Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical (Lakoff & Johnson 1999:3) Structures of perceiving and doing must be appropriated to shape our acts of understanding and knowing. Our sensory-motor capacities must be recruited for abstract thinking. (Johnson 2005:16) Ideas have to be drawn from other senses, have to be talked about in other, more concrete terms.
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Visual Primacy
Viberg carried out the first extensive and in depth typological study on perception verbs in a sample of 53 languages from 14 different language stock.
sight > hearing > touch> smell taste ----(Viberg 1984:136 ) Vision can extend to other perceptual domains but not vise versa.

The connection between vision and knowledge may be fairly common crossculturally, if not universal ----Sweetser (1990:45)

Chinese evidence of visual primacy,

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Mechanism of Semantic Extensions

We have found that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980:3) The driving force behind semantic extension is metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor can be regarded as a force of conceptual binding (between distant conceptual domains) and metonymy as a force of conceptual spreading (inside and across adjacent conceptual domains). Both forces together make the human mind and human language what they are.
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Five domains of semantic extension

4. Social interactive domain

Motivated, purposeful social interaction

5.Intellectual Cognitive Domain

Conscious use of mental efforts for construal

3. Affective domain
Emotions & Attitudes

Visual Domain
V

1. Physical Environment Domain

Concrete objects or phenomena in the external world

2. Temperospatial Domain
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Time and Space

Methods and Tools (for Chinese)

The disyllablization and multisyllablization of vocabulary is a remarkable change on the evolution of Chinese language. AntConc concordance program developed by Laurance Antony

CCL

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Methods and Tools (for English)

The Sketch Engine developed by Adam Kilgarriff. It gives automatic, corpusbased summaries of a words grammatical and collocational behavior. It is a corpus query system. The corpus that we are using for describing English visual words is British National Corpus (BNC) Other resources The American Heritage Dictionary (fourth edition) The WordNet
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Semantic Extensions of Visual Organs (I)

English Eye shaped objects Eye shaped small holes Eye of a potato; eye of a hurricane Chinese

Eye of a needleeye of a rope

Resemblance in function Resemblance in property

Cats eye, electronic eye eye of camera The apple of the eye

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Semantic Extensions of Visual Organs cont.

Temporospatial Domain The movement of the eye stands for the movement of time The reach of the eye stands for the extension of space Vicinity to the eye stands for the present English A wink of an eye A blink of an eye A twinkle of an eye Chinese

Beyond the reach of the eye

Looking with the eye stands for the coming of the event
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Semantic Extensions of Visual Organs cont.

Affective Domain (emotions and attitudes ) Emotions English Chinese

Eye n. gentle eyes, eye sore Eye v. eg. She eyed her devotion to me Eye n.

Attitudes

eg. Eyes are full of hatred

Eye v.

eg. The man behind the desk eyed us suspiciously.

Metonymy: PERCEPTUAL ORGAN STANDS FOR PERCEPTION Metaphor: EYES ARE CONTAINERS, AFFECTION IS WARMTH Company Logo

Semantic Extensions of Visual Organs cont.

Social Interactive Domain Purposefully looking at someone

English

Chinese

Eye sb up (look at someone in away thinking that they are sexually attractive ) Give sb the eye Wink at sb

Using eyes to send messages when talking is inconvenient

eg. She winked a warning at me

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Semantic Extensions of Visual Organs cont.

Intellectual Cognitive Domain Attention English All eyes Chinese

Capacity for esthetic judgment

Capacity for intellectual judgment Capacity for discovering Way of understanding
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Has an eye for beauty, art, etc

Has an eye for (essentials, talent) Sharp eyes Penetrating eyes In the eye of (the law)

Semantic extensions of visual adjectives

Blind

Blind man/beggar/ Color blind

Blind spot/obedience/ faith/rage/panic/ hatred Blind alley, blind date

Lack of certain knowledge Talk nonsense

Blind trial, double blind test

metaphor: KNOWING IS SEEING; BELIEVING IS SEEING

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Classification of Visual Verbs

Active Verb Chinese English Look at gaze at Experiential Verb Chinese English see glimpse notice spot witness Descriptive Verb Chinese English look

glance at stare at watch

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Semantic extensions of Visual Verbs

Affective Domain

English

Chinese

Active Verbs Looking up is respecting Looking down is disrespecting

Look up to Look down upon/on Look down nose at

Metonymy: MANNER STANDS FOR ATTITUDE

Conceptual Metaphor: IMPORTANT IS BIG

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Semantic extensions of Visual Verbs cont.

Social Interactive Domain

Active verb

English

Chinese

see see see see a a a a doctor, patient, lawyer, client

Experiential verb

Metonymy: ACTION STANDS FOR RESULT Metaphor: SOCIAL INTERACTION IS SEEING

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Semantic extensions of Visual Verbs cont.

Temporospatial Domain English Chinese

Forward is future

Look ahead, look forward to

Backward is past

Look back

Metonymy: SPATIAL DIRECTION STANDS FOR TEMPORAL DIRECTION Metaphor: LOOKING FORWARD IS EXPECTING
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LOOING BACKWARD IS REFLECTING

Semantic extensions of Visual Verbs cont.

Intellectual Cognitive Domain Visual attention to cognitive attention Visual selectivity to cognitive selectivity Visual judgment to cognitive judgment Visual categorization to cognitive categorization English eg. Do not just look at immediate interest. have eyes on set/clap eyes on Look to (further increase), See (signs of recovery) see as Chinese eg. eg.

Metaphor: MENTAL FUNCTION IS PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE

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Structured Mapping from Visual Domain to Intellectual Cognitive Domain

Perceiver Eye Impaired eyes Bright eyes Visual capacity Visual attention Visual selectivity Visual categorization Visibility Looking Angle of looking Direction of looking (forward or backward) Seeing Cognizer Mind Impaired cognition Smart mind Intellectual capacity Intellectual attention Intellectual selectivity Intellectual categorization Comprehensibility Thinking Angle of thinking Direction of thinking (future or past) Understanding

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Source Domain

Target Domain

Some Incongruence In Conceptual Metaphor

English KNOWING IS SEEING eg. I see UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING eg. I dont see the joke. Chinese KNOWING IS VISIBILITY eg. UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING WHAT IS HIDDEN eg.

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Conclusions
Commonalities
Visual words can extend to: 1. physical environment domain to refer to other objects and shapes that can bring associations of the eye. 2. temporospatial domain through 1) the self movement of the eye; 2) the direction of looking. 3. affective domain through the manner of looking. 4. social interactive domain through purposeful seeing. 5. Intellectual cognitive domain through structured mapping
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Individualities
1. Chinese is more sensitive to the resemblance in shapes. 2. In Chinese, the vicinity to the eye can be used to indicate the upcoming events. 3. In Chinese, more words are used to indicate attitudes. 4. In Chinese, different levels of social interaction are indicated by different words including both active verbs and experiential verbs 5. The use of V-R compounds and V- D compounds in Chinese indicate it takes efforts to reach understanding

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References
1. Lakoff, G & M. Johnson. Metaphors we live by [M]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 2. Lakoff, G. & M. Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh-The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought [M]. New York: Basic books, 1999 3. Johnson, M. The philosophical significance of image schemas [A]. H. Beate (ed). From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter 2005: 15-34 4. Sweetser, E. From etymology to pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure [M]. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990: 54 5. Viberg, . The verbs of perception: a typological study [J]. Linguistics, 1984(21): 123-162.

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